Haap's array can beam up to 3.6 megawatts of energy into the sky.Photo: Joao Canziani

In 1992, the Navy handed out a $21.6 million contract. The deal didn't go to an established engineering outfit or defense firm. It went, instead, to Arco, for which Papadopoulos was a consultant.

For more than a year, planning proceeded largely out of public view. Then, in 1993, an Anchorage teachers' union rep named Nick Begich—son of one of Alaska's most important political families—found a notice about Haarp in the Australian conspiracy magazine Nexus.

When Begich was 13, a Cessna carrying his father, a Congressional representative, disappeared. Neither the plane nor its passengers were ever recovered. Over the years, Begich became obsessed with uncovering mysteries. Between gigs as a gemologist, miner, school supervisor, and Chickaloon tribal administrator, he regularly lectured on government mind-control technology. So you can imagine his reaction when he began looking into Haarp: the weather-control patents, the Pentagon proposals for long-range spying, the oil company schemes. Senator Stevens had even suggested that the ionosphere could end our dependency on fossil fuels. "At any time over Fairbanks," Stevens said on the Senate floor, "there is more energy than there is in the entire United States." Begich had hit the conspiracy jackpot.

In 1995, he self-published a book, Angels Don't Play This HAARP. It sold 100,000 copies. He started giving speeches on Haarp's dangers everywhere, from UFO conventions to the European Parliament. Marvel Comics, Tom Clancy, and, of course, The X-Files made the facility an ominous feature of their narratives. A Russian military journal warned that blasting the ionosphere would trigger a cascade of electrons that could flip Earth's magnetic poles. "Simply speaking, the planet will 'capsize,'" it warned. The European Parliament held hearings about Haarp; so did the Alaska state legislature.

Begich told his audiences that Haarp was a high-powered weapon prototype. Forget spying underground with low-frequency waves—Haarp was so strong it could trigger earthquakes. And by dumping all those radio waves into the ionosphere, Haarp could turn a miles-wide portion of the upper atmosphere into a giant lens. "The result will be an absolutely catastrophic release of pure energy," he wrote. "The sky would literally appear to burn."

The military's response only amped up the conspiracists. When program managers swore that the facility would "never be used for military functions," Begich would trot out military reports touting satellite-blinding research plans or then-secretary of defense William Cohen's suggestion that "electromagnetic waves" could alter the climate and control earthquakes and volcanoes remotely.

Begich's agitating didn't delay the project too much. (Government research projects slip deadlines and bust budgets just fine on their own.) But by 1999, when Haarp's first 48-antenna array was finished, the project's cost was on its way to tripling the original feasibility study estimate, and the military was getting antsy. Sure, the initial experiments had been scientifically impressive, detecting ionization in the atmosphere caused by a gamma ray flare from a neutron star 23,000 light-years away and finding bunkers 300 feet below the earth's surface. But the Pentagon wanted to know when its overpriced conspiracy-magnet would produce that battle-ready technology they'd been promised.

The Haarp team was caught in an expectations trap. In theory, the Pentagon should spend a lot of money on basic research. That's how you come up with the Internet and stealth jets. But in practice, the generals and Congress want science that's useful now. Papadopoulos understood this instinctively: You have to sell it. Looking at the sleep cycles of fruit flies? Why, that might someday lead to indefatigable supertroops! Building nanometer-long hinges? You're developing artificial muscles that could let soldiers leap buildings! But it was tough to make that kind of case for Haarp. "It's like, I talk to my mom and she says, 'When are you gonna build something?'" says Craig Selcher, Haarp program manager for the Navy. "Mom," he answers, "I'm trying to unlock the secrets of the universe!"

So the ionospherists formed a panel to find a new purpose for Haarp. Tether, who funded the original Arco studies and had consulted on the project, was named chair.

Months later, the group had its rationale, and it was ambitious to say the least: post-nuclear space cleanup. By the late '90s, Cold War fears had been replaced by worries that a rogue state could get a nuke. If Pyongyang set off a bomb in orbit, it would fry crucial satellites. Theoretically, ultralow-frequency waves in the ionosphere would knock the particles out of their natural spin, sending them tumbling down into the lower atmosphere to be harmlessly reabsorbed. The Pentagon loved the idea. But it would need a lot of testing—which could only be done at Haarp. "You could actually see the lightbulb flick on," says Ed Kennedy, a former Haarp program manager. "This was something Haarp could actually help solve."